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Continuations
In computer science, a continuation is an abstract representation of the control state of a computer program. A continuation implements ( reifies) the program control state, i.e. the continuation is a data structure that represents the computational process at a given point in the process's execution; the created data structure can be accessed by the programming language, instead of being hidden in the runtime environment. Continuations are useful for encoding other control mechanisms in programming languages such as exceptions, generators, coroutines, and so on. The "current continuation" or "continuation of the computation step" is the continuation that, from the perspective of running code, would be derived from the current point in a program's execution. The term ''continuations'' can also be used to refer to first-class continuations, which are constructs that give a programming language the ability to save the execution state at any point and return to that point at a lat ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
First-class Continuations
In computer science, a continuation is an abstract representation of the control state of a computer program. A continuation implements ( reifies) the program control state, i.e. the continuation is a data structure that represents the computational process at a given point in the process's execution; the created data structure can be accessed by the programming language, instead of being hidden in the runtime environment. Continuations are useful for encoding other control mechanisms in programming languages such as exceptions, generators, coroutines, and so on. The "current continuation" or "continuation of the computation step" is the continuation that, from the perspective of running code, would be derived from the current point in a program's execution. The term ''continuations'' can also be used to refer to first-class continuations, which are constructs that give a programming language the ability to save the execution state at any point and return to that point at a lat ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Continuation-passing Style
In functional programming, continuation-passing style (CPS) is a style of programming in which control is passed explicitly in the form of a continuation. This is contrasted with direct style, which is the usual style of programming. Gerald Jay Sussman and Guy L. Steele, Jr. coined the phrase in AI Memo 349 (1975), which sets out the first version of the Scheme programming language. John C. Reynolds gives a detailed account of the numerous discoveries of continuations. A function written in continuation-passing style takes an extra argument: an explicit "continuation"; ''i.e.'', a function of one argument. When the CPS function has computed its result value, it "returns" it by calling the continuation function with this value as the argument. That means that when invoking a CPS function, the calling function is required to supply a procedure to be invoked with the subroutine's "return" value. Expressing code in this form makes a number of things explicit which are implicit in direc ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Call-with-current-continuation
In the Scheme computer programming language, the procedure call-with-current-continuation, abbreviated call/cc, is used as a control flow operator. It has been adopted by several other programming languages. Taking a function f as its only argument, (call/cc f) within an expression is applied to the current continuation of the expression. For example ((call/cc f) e2) is equivalent to applying f to the current continuation of the expression. The current continuation is given by replacing (call/cc f) by a variable c bound by a lambda abstraction, so the current continuation is (lambda (c) (c e2)). Applying the function f to it gives the final result (f (lambda (c) (c e2))). As a complementary example, in an expression (e1 (call/cc f)), the continuation for the sub-expression (call/cc f) is (lambda (c) (e1 c)), so the whole expression is equivalent to (f (lambda (c) (e1 c))). In other words it takes a "snapshot" of the current control context or control state of the program as an ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Coroutine
Coroutines are computer program components that generalize subroutines for non-preemptive multitasking, by allowing execution to be suspended and resumed. Coroutines are well-suited for implementing familiar program components such as cooperative tasks, exceptions, event loops, iterators, infinite lists and pipes. Melvin Conway coined the term ''coroutine'' in 1958 when he applied it to the construction of an assembly program. The first published explanation of the coroutine appeared later, in 1963. Comparison with Subroutines Subroutines are special cases of coroutines. When subroutines are invoked, execution begins at the start, and once a subroutine exits, it is finished; an instance of a subroutine only returns once, and does not hold state between invocations. By contrast, coroutines can exit by calling other coroutines, which may later return to the point where they were invoked in the original coroutine; from the coroutine's point of view, it is not exiting but calling a ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Lisp (programming Language)
Lisp (historically LISP) is a family of programming languages with a long history and a distinctive, fully parenthesized prefix notation. Originally specified in 1960, Lisp is the second-oldest high-level programming language still in common use, after Fortran. Lisp has changed since its early days, and many dialects have existed over its history. Today, the best-known general-purpose Lisp dialects are Common Lisp, Scheme, Racket and Clojure. Lisp was originally created as a practical mathematical notation for computer programs, influenced by (though not originally derived from) the notation of Alonzo Church's lambda calculus. It quickly became a favored programming language for artificial intelligence (AI) research. As one of the earliest programming languages, Lisp pioneered many ideas in computer science, including tree data structures, automatic storage management, dynamic typing, conditionals, higher-order functions, recursion, the self-hosting compiler, and the read†... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Scheme (programming Language)
Scheme is a dialect of the Lisp family of programming languages. Scheme was created during the 1970s at the MIT AI Lab and released by its developers, Guy L. Steele and Gerald Jay Sussman, via a series of memos now known as the Lambda Papers. It was the first dialect of Lisp to choose lexical scope and the first to require implementations to perform tail-call optimization, giving stronger support for functional programming and associated techniques such as recursive algorithms. It was also one of the first programming languages to support first-class continuations. It had a significant influence on the effort that led to the development of Common Lisp.Common LISP: The Language, 2nd Ed., Guy L. Steele Jr. Digital Press; 1981. . "Common Lisp is a new dialect of Lisp, a successor to MacLisp, influenced strongly by ZetaLisp and to some extent by Scheme and InterLisp." The Scheme language is standardized in the official IEEE standard1178-1990 (Reaff 2008) IEEE Standard for the S ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Generator (computer Science)
In computer science, a generator is a routine that can be used to control the iteration behaviour of a loop. All generators are also iterators. A generator is very similar to a function that returns an array, in that a generator has parameters, can be called, and generates a sequence of values. However, instead of building an array containing all the values and returning them all at once, a generator yields the values one at a time, which requires less memory and allows the caller to get started processing the first few values immediately. In short, a generator ''looks like'' a function but ''behaves like'' an iterator. Generators can be implemented in terms of more expressive control flow constructs, such as coroutines or first-class continuations. Generators, also known as semicoroutines, are a special case of (and weaker than) coroutines, in that they always yield control back to the caller (when passing a value back), rather than specifying a coroutine to jump to; see comp ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Control Flow
In computer science, control flow (or flow of control) is the order in which individual statements, instructions or function calls of an imperative program are executed or evaluated. The emphasis on explicit control flow distinguishes an ''imperative programming'' language from a '' declarative programming'' language. Within an imperative programming language, a ''control flow statement'' is a statement that results in a choice being made as to which of two or more paths to follow. For non-strict functional languages, functions and language constructs exist to achieve the same result, but they are usually not termed control flow statements. A set of statements is in turn generally structured as a block, which in addition to grouping, also defines a lexical scope. Interrupts and signals are low-level mechanisms that can alter the flow of control in a way similar to a subroutine, but usually occur as a response to some external stimulus or event (that can occur asynchronously), ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Green Thread
In computer programming, a green thread is a thread that is scheduled by a runtime library or virtual machine (VM) instead of natively by the underlying operating system (OS). Green threads emulate multithreaded environments without relying on any native OS abilities, and they are managed in user space instead of kernel space, enabling them to work in environments that do not have native thread support. Etymology Green threads refers to the name of the original thread library for the programming language Java (that was released in version 1.1 and then Green threads were abandoned in version 1.3 to native threads). It was designed by ''The Green Team'' at Sun Microsystems. History Green threads were briefly available in Java between 1997 and 2000 Green threads share a single operating system thread through co-operative concurrency and can therefore not achieve parallelism performance gains like operating system threads. The main benefit of coroutines and green threads is ease ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Reification (computer Science)
Reification is the process by which an abstract idea about a computer program is turned into an explicit data model or other object created in a programming language. A computable/addressable object—a resource—is created in a system as a proxy for a non computable/addressable object. By means of reification, something that was previously implicit, unexpressed, and possibly inexpressible is explicitly formulated and made available to conceptual (logical or computational) manipulation. Informally, reification is often referred to as "making something a first-class citizen" within the scope of a particular system. Some aspect of a system can be reified at ''language design time'', which is related to reflection in programming languages. It can be applied as a stepwise refinement at ''system design time''. Reification is one of the most frequently used techniques of conceptual analysis and knowledge representation. Reflective programming languages In the context of programming ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Computer Science
Computer science is the study of computation, automation, and information. Computer science spans theoretical disciplines (such as algorithms, theory of computation, information theory, and automation) to Applied science, practical disciplines (including the design and implementation of Computer architecture, hardware and Computer programming, software). Computer science is generally considered an area of research, academic research and distinct from computer programming. Algorithms and data structures are central to computer science. The theory of computation concerns abstract models of computation and general classes of computational problem, problems that can be solved using them. The fields of cryptography and computer security involve studying the means for secure communication and for preventing Vulnerability (computing), security vulnerabilities. Computer graphics (computer science), Computer graphics and computational geometry address the generation of images. Progr ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Process Image
In computing, a system image is a serialized copy of the entire state of a computer system stored in some non-volatile form such as a file. A system is said to be capable of using system images if it can be shut down and later restored to exactly the same state. In such cases, system images can be used for backup. Hibernation is an example that uses an image of the entire machine's RAM. Disk images {{Main article, Disk image If a system has all its state written to a disk, then a system image can be produced by simply copying that disk to a file elsewhere, often with disk cloning applications. On many systems a complete system image cannot be created by a disk cloning program running within that system because information can be held outside of disks and volatile memory, for example in non-volatile memory like boot ROMs. Process images A process image is a copy of a given process's state at a given point in time. It is often used to create persistence within an otherwise volatil ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
